Total War Explained: The Levée en Masse, Sherman's March and Stalingrad

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This episode opens at Stalingrad in 1942, where unpainted T-34 tanks rolled from the factory straight into battle, and asks how war grew to absorb entire societies. It defines total war by mobilization and target legitimacy and walks through Stig Förster's dimensions: total purposes, total methods, total mobilization and total control, plus a fifth dimension, total change, added by another scholar. The term was coined by French writer Léon Daudet in 1918 and popularized by Erich Ludendorff in 1935, but the practice reaches back to the Mongols and to the French levée en masse of 1793. William T. Sherman's 1864 March to the Sea, with his aim of making a hostile people feel the hard hand of war, is examined as a debated case.

In World War I, Zeppelin commander Peter Strasser bombed British cities, Britain's 1915 Shell Crisis led to a Ministry of Munitions under David Lloyd George, and the Royal Navy blockade helped bring Germany's turnip winter. World War II carried the model further: Japan's National Mobilization Law, more than 18 million people pressed into forced labor across East Asia, Detroit plants retooled for bombers, and British children evacuated from city slums. The Allied demand for unconditional surrender, set at Casablanca, ended in debellatio and the Nuremberg trials. Nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction then pushed the superpowers toward proxy wars, while the logic of targeting infrastructure persisted from Korea onward.

• The 1793 decree assigned roles to all: young men to fight, married men to forge arms, women to make tents, children to turn lint into bandages, old men to rally the public.
• Strasser, called a baby killer by the press, argued that the non-combatant no longer existed in modern war.
• The Defence of the Realm Act let Britain's government seize factories and even set pub hours.
• Ford's Willow Run plant built a B-24 Liberator bomber every 63 minutes.
• Patrick Blackett's operational research team showed that large convoys needed fewer escorts per ship than several small ones.